On January 4thas reported on DarkReading and DataBreaches, Lincoln National Corporation notified the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office of a major security breach affecting 1.2 million people. In addition to the internal cost of investigating the breach and bringing in an external forensics team; in addition to planning and executing remediation activities; in addition to the brand impact and loss of trust in the marketplace, Lincoln National had to cut checks for identity and credit monitoring services for all affected users……….

As part of an experiment at work, I wanted to intercept all traffic on port 80 that was headed to a certain IP address. To handle the traffic, I built a python script using BaseHTTPServer based around this sample code and ran it on .202 - one of my CentOS 5.2 boxes.

Next step was to get the traffic to the right machine. As the browser was on a Vista box, I used the windows command route ADD 82.94.164.162 192.168.0.202 Yes that’s the python.org website. I often use that for testing as is generally well behaved and doesn’t seem to do ’special’ things.

Now I needed to tell the .202 box to not forward the traffic, but to deliver it locally. iptables to the rescue: sudo /sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -j REDIRECT

Didn’t even need to poke a hole in the iptables firewall as this seemed to do the job without.

Running out of space on your VMWare Server? Try this to convert some of your larger preallocated disks to growable. This way they only consume the space on the disk that they currently need, and will not consume disk space on the host drive for disk space on the guest systems whic is in fact empty and unused.

Stop the VM, then:

vmware-vdiskmanager -r GuestVM.vmdk -t 0 NewGuestVM.vmdk

This will create a new, growable, copy of the original drive. Then you will need to point the VM at the new drive (or delete the original and rename the new one back to the same name as the old).

I assume there is a performance penalty for doing this. But if you are running out of space, this can at least buy you some time.

While you are messing around on the command line, you could use the following to defrag the VMDK file for better perfomance.